Posts Tagged ‘IP Address’

At GoGrid we are always looking for ways to improve our product and add value for our customers. We have recently released some new services built on our new Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture that customers are already adopting: the Dynamic Load Balancer and Firewall Service. We have recently released a Console access feature on our management console for all our customers.

The new console service allows customers to directly access their cloud servers through the management console without using a third party client. Customers have been asking for this feature as it allows for emergency access in the case where they have locked themselves out with a bad host firewall configuration or if they need to do further diagnostics. Accessing the service is easy.

Building out a highly available website means that it is fault-tolerant and reliable. A best practice is to put your web servers behind a load balancer not only to distribute load, but also to mitigate the risk of an end user accessing a failing web server. However, traditional load balancing funnels traffic into a single-tenant environment—a single point of failure. A better practice is to have a distributed load balancer that takes advantage of the features of the cloud and increases the fault-tolerance abilities on the load balancer. GoGrid’sDynamic Load Balancer service is designed around a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture that turns the data center into one big load balancer.

GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancer offers many features, but one of its core features is high availability (HA). It is HA in two ways.

First, on the real server side, deploying multiple clones of your real servers is a standard load-balancing practice. That way, if one of your servers goes down, the load balancer will use the remaining servers in the pool to continue to serve up content. In addition, each GoGrid cloud server that you deploy as a web server (in the real server pool) is most likely on a different physical node. This setup provides additional protection in the case of hardware failure.

Second, on the Dynamic Load Balancer side, the load balancers are designed to be self-healing. In case of a hardware failure, Dynamic Load Balancing is designed to immediately recover to a functioning node. The Virtual IP address of the Dynamic Load Balancer (the VIP) is maintained as well as all the configurations, with all the changes happening on the back end. This approach ensures the Dynamic Load Balancer will continue to function with minimal interruption, preventing the Dynamic Load Balancer from being a single point of failure. Because the load balancer is the public-facing side of a web server, whenever it goes down the website goes down. Having a self-healing load balancer therefore makes the web application more resilient.

Users with websites or applications that need to always be available would benefit from including GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancing in their infrastructure. The load balancer is important for ensuring the public side of a service is always available; however, including easily scalable cloud servers, the ability to store images of those servers in persistent storage, and the option to replicate infrastructure between data centers with CloudLink are all important elements of a successful HA setup.

GoGrid has recently released some new features that improve on the customer experience using our private network. Private Network Automation (PNA) is currently available in all our data centers. As of this most recent release, these new features will be exposed if you enable PNA by contacting support:

All servers will have a private IP assigned upon creation (both virtual and dedicated)

Any private IPs that are used will be marked as assigned on the portal

The assignment of private IPs happen automatically at the time a new server is deployed. GoGrid has enabled this for all new customers. If you are an existing customer, this is feature IS NOT enabled in data centers where you have servers deployed. You will need to file a support ticket to request this feature. Note that once enabled, this will be active for all new servers only – existing servers will keep their existing settings.

As you can see from the screenshot below, once you create the server, you will have a public IP and a private IP assigned. Note that this feature is enabled for both virtual and dedicated servers.

This is also visible in the Networking tab so that you can monitor private IPs that have been assigned from your block.

CloudPassage is a key security partner that has images available on the GoGrid Partner Exchange. The CloudPassage images on GoGrid come pre-installed with their Halo daemon. This is available on CentOS, Debian, Red Hat, and Ubuntu on both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Alternately, you can launch a GoGrid base image and install the Halo daemon on your own. This tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of Linux and SSH as well as basic firewall strategies. It also assumes that you know how to configure private IPs so that will not be covered here.

Yesterday we rolled out a new feature for GoGrid that should make the creation of Servers and Load Balancers even easier and faster. We call it “IP Suggest” and it is extremely easy to use. As you are creating a new Server or Load Balancer and you come to the IP Address field, just start typing in the beginning digits of your IP addresses. The network “widget” shows you a list of all of your Public IP addresses, used or unused.

For the Application/Web/Database servers, only the UNUSED IP addresses are presented within the IP address field.

The Load Balancer acts a bit differently. For the Virtual IP field, only the UNUSED IP addresses are displayed, however on the Real IPs field (these would be the IP addresses of the application/web/database server where you want the Load Balancer to direct traffic), ALL IP addresses are displayed.